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Games have long been used as a tool for teaching important subject matter, from concept building to problem solving. Through fun learning, students may further develop their curiosities and interest in their study. This article addresses the issue of learning biomolecular structures by virtual reality gaming. A bio edutainment solution featuring stereographic visualization, 3D modeling, and game interaction is developed for students to learn amino acids, α -helices, β -sheets, and other protein structure information. A pilot study is performed in this work with Singapore Chinese High School; initial results of this study are presented.

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Bio structural and functional research and education is playing an increasingly important role in today's post-genome era. Protein geometry and shape modeling is thus a fundamental issue for protein visualization. The number of protein structures determined by X-ray crystallography or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is expanding in an exponential rate. Recent technology advancement has also made it possible for the determination of larger and more complicated proteins structure. A generic and automatic shape modeling for protein structures is therefore highly desired for effective and efficient protein visualization. We propose a bio-native geometric modeling technique in this paper for constructing protein secondary structure. Our emphasis is placed on the shape compatibility with the protein conformation property. Efforts are also made to handle smooth sweeping for complex protein structures. We describe as well a Virtual Reality (VR) application for protein structure education based on our Bio-native shape modeling and visualization techniques developed in this work.

Collision detection in simulation can easily become a bottleneck due to its computationally intensive nature. Recent developments in graphics hardware, however, offer a viable solution for rapid and efficient collision detection. The authors propose a new two-phase technique using the latest graphics hardware. In the broad phase, a scene graph is created to partition objects in a 3D environment for initial collision checking. In the narrow phase, a multiple-viewing volumes method is used to detect interferences between a convex model and a model of arbitrary geometry. First, the convex model is used to define six viewing volumes. The convex and arbitrary models are then rendered respectively within the defined viewing volumes. Finally, results of collision detection can be easily achieved by querying the occlusions between these rendered models in the image space. Compared with other collision detection algorithms, this method produces promising results and is successfully applied in our 3D virtual reality games.